Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Monday 03.22 Clubhouse Room

Episode Date: March 28, 2021

This is the clubhouse room from Monday, March 22nd. Topics discussed here include the situation with the Dispo app. Zoom’s new SDK. The fate of the HomePod and that secret new gizmo inside the HomePod Mini, and a deep dive into two of the longreads from LAST week: Moore's Law for Everything post and Tim O’Reilly’s piece The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. This is the Clubhouse Room that Chris Messina and I hosted on Monday, March 22nd. Topics discussed here include the situation with the Dispo app, Zoom's new SDK, the fate of the HomePod, and that secret new gizmo inside the HomePod mini, and a deep dive into two of the long reads from last week's show, the Moore's Law for Everything Post, and Tim O'Reilly's. piece on the end of Silicon Valley.

Recording for the first time. One of the many things talk about balls in the air. So I have this Zoom, whatever you call it gadget. And so I experimented with it yesterday. And for about 45 minutes, I experimented with it, and the battery

drained entirely. So they had to invest in an actual AC input for this device because there's no way we would have lasted an hour on the battery input. All right. What is this thing? It's a Zoom one.

You know, look. Okay, you tell me later. We'll do a whole show on how to record. Yeah. You know what? Yeah, that's a good point. We could do that and people might listen. All right.

So I believe that that is going. That is recording. You are hearing me. And, um, all right, Chris. No. We're good. We're good for now. You're going to play the music or not going to do the music at the time?

You know what? Let's do the music real quick. Well, see, now is when we're about to, but now is when we're about to lose the whole thing. All right. I'm going to do, I'm going to attempt the music. Yep. And then you do an intro and then I'll do the first segment. So here comes where we might lose everything.

Hold on. How loud was that? We can hear you. All right. Then, let's try this one more time. That sounds promising. Okay. Hooray, it worked. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience.

This is an intermittent, not always... Wait, wait, I'm hearing myself. Oh, God. What? What? I'm like hearing myself as an echo. Oh. No, we're good.

We're good. Okay. Anyways, you're here to listen to a bunch of knuckleheads, try to figure out the world of social audio. And also just talk about the day's news to review the headlines and stories that Brian covers in the TechMe and Ryan Home podcast and go a little bit deeper, provide a little more context, and try to unearth and unpack some of the good stuff that might be going on behind the scenes or to put these things in the context as part of the overall arcs of what's happening in the world of technology.

Today we have a bunch of different segments that I think are pretty interesting from today's show. Some of them, I feel like they kind of came out of left field and others, I suppose, have kind of been building up for a little while. And, you know, I appreciate, I guess if you're going to play the whole segment about Dispo, you know, that you were sort of wading into this one a little bit reluctantly, both given the subject matter and the topic. But on the other hand, I feel like there is a broader conversation to be had about this. And I will admit that I don't know all the things about it, but why don't you go ahead and play that clip, set up the scene,

and then we can dive into the particulars about why this story is interesting and relevant. Yeah, I agree that I was unaware of this, and I will play for as long as I think I can hear, and then I'll cut it out. But, yes, once I come back, we should talk about how this has apparently been bubbling up for a while, and let's see what we have to say about it. Remember Dispo, that hot new photo social app that we were keeping our eye on as a potential next big thing? Dispo basically made you wait until the morning before your photos developed, in quotes. It was co-founded by famous YouTuber David Dobrick.

Well, one of Dispo's major VC backers, Spark Capital has suddenly announced it is, quote, severing all ties with Dispo after claims of sexual assault against a member of Dobrick's vlog. squad arose last week. I suppose I need to back up and explain a bit. David Dobrick has been called the Jimmy Fallon of Gen Z for his popular YouTube videos, which apparently focus on comedy and pranks and stunts and the like, tens of millions of subscribers. D'Oberg is one of those YouTubers that has one of those multi-million dollar mansions that is ostensibly the scene of a lot of his videos. He also has this sort of entourage of people known as the Vlog Squad, who also So star in his videos. It is a member of the vlog squad that is accused of the sexual assault, though there have been some other questionable incidents lately that Dobrick himself has recently

apologized for in video. Anyway, without getting two in the weeds over all of that, last week, Mr. Dobrick was losing sponsors left and right. Hello Fresh, Dollar Shave Club, EA sports, seatkeek, all severed ties. The very first link in the show notes can give you a rundown of all of that. Now, normally, I do tend to steer clear of these sorts of YouTube star and influencer controversies, but there is real sort of industry news here because I can't really recall seeing this happen before, quoting TechCrunch. In light of the recent news about the Vlog Squad and David Dobrick, the co-founder of Dispo, we have made the decision to sever all ties with the company. Spark Capital tweeted, we have stepped down from our position on the board, and we are

in the process of making arrangements to ensure we do not profit from our recent investment in Dispo, end quote. Okay. I think you cut it a little bit quick, but we got the point. Yes, sorry. I mean, you can go, you can read the show notes, click through the links. You know, part of this, I guess for me, just to start, because I think it's worthwhile context, we actually did a show not so long ago on Clubhouse here where we were talking about Dispo. talking about, you know, the design of this project.

We were talking about it being, actually, I don't want to get too meta too fast in this, but it is interesting to sort of imagine the way in which we were describing it as kind of like this anti-instagram, you know, product in a way that was about, I don't know if I'd call it, like, discretion, but the idea of keeping you in the moment. And one of the points that I was making was just that one of the behaviors that it seemed to be designed against was going to a party or a social event and people like, you know, are taking photos and whatever and sort of getting lost in their phones and getting sucked into the feed.

and then getting out of the moment and that this type of product where you take the photos and you don't even know what you shot and then you know you get wasted and then like the next morning you look at them you're like ah ha ha isn't that funny i mean oh my god like this is such a sort of i don't know if it's tail wagging the dog or if it's like you know art imitating life or whatever it is but it just seems too on the nose and you're like it's so without i don't know i just it's sort of cringy well and and and tiptoeing around, you know, whatever you do or do not want to say, let's just say this. Can you remember a time when basically a VC firm walks away a month from doing an investment in what is clearly one of the hottest startups in the world and just dropping them like a hot potato?

Yeah, no. I mean, I think so that's the other really big thing for me that stands out here, which is, like, this says a couple things. And it also relates to something that Benedict Evans just, I think, wrote about either today or yesterday, you know, where there's a conversation that's also happening about the nature of technology and technology businesses that we've kind of moved beyond the point where you can kind of design or build technology that in and of itself is sort of magical. And like, wow, you built a photo sharing app. Now it's like there's a cult of personality. that can surround or be part of these products in a way that that used to not work. You know, there were several other celebs, you know, whether it's Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber that tried to put out their own apps. But they weren't really kind of like in that space. They were sort of just like, you know, branded add-ons, whereas this feels like this is part of the sort of cult and culture of maybe a new generation of founders, right?

And the toxicity that then surrounds someone in this case actually can really do harm, quite literally to the prospects of this thing ever getting out of the gate. And so, you know, I don't know anything about, well, I mean, I know a few people, and I've talked to a few people who are on the team, not recently, but for folks who have really, you know, poured themselves into this launch, who have worked really hard to get this app out, it's just got to be so stomach-turning to feel this sense of sort of betrayal, you know, that was the thing that took away.

That struck me today is the amount of talent that was, involved in this apparently. So this is an interesting thing to me where, like what you're saying is to what degree was this, when we talked about it the last time, we were talking about it in terms of like, well, if this is a next big thing, potentially TM, is it training people to behave in social media a different way? And to what degree is this like a next generation thing? But maybe we missed what the real story here. was, was this an app that was created around personality? Right.

And so for all of the talent that we both know that we're involved in this, that maybe is suddenly high and dry, to what degree was this almost like a Hollywood package deal? You know what I mean? Where it's like you get the star attached, you get the IP attached, you get the, you know, it's good. Don't worry.

Yeah, so I guess the question is, can Dispo really survive the loss of, you know, Dobrook's fame and notoriety? Is it better off, you know, for him, you know, leaving? And also, of course, all the fundraising going as well. Or is it sort of DOA now that it's been tainted in this way? And at least, you know, when I perceive that demographic, like a younger demographic, there really seems to be this. And again, I don't want to speak in absolutes, but. My perception is that if there is a tainting of a brand in this way, I mean, sexual assault is like no, you know, no laughing matter, right?

Like, oh, that's like the sexual assault app. Like, that just doesn't go well. And I don't think that goes away soon, right? DLA, right. Well, and that's the other thing is that, like, it was still sort of this like buzzy beta thing, which I don't know if you ever got into. I was never able to. Oh, you did.

Okay. I did. Um, well, so we can ask. If it seemed like it was something that was interesting. But really what we were all waiting for was, okay, if they opened the doors, it was so buzzy, let's see if this really is the next big thing. And like, that's, I can't see that happening. Yeah, you know, the one thing that actually is a little bit of a caveat and maybe a little bit

of a saving grace. And again, I don't know how to put this all into perspective. But one of the things that I noticed immediately after they kind of relaxed the, I guess, restriction on the invite pool, although maybe it's still invite only, was I think, version like 1.02 or 1.03 and of course, you know, I'm the weirdo that reads the release notes, was focused on Japanese translation. Oh my God. Wow. Now I'm realizing this. And like, I'm sorry, I know this is like a little behind the scenes, but I sent you that clip where Dobrook was and his co-host were essentially making fun of Japanese people. And, um, yeah, and this is like a clip that's on YouTube.

You can go find it and see it. And the fact that soon after launching, they immediately were translating the app into Japanese means that there was some resonance. in, you know, Japanese culture where this, this app essentially, you know, was taking off. And of course, Twitter is big in Japan. And so we've seen other social apps that have survived sort of outside the English, you know, kind of mainstream. And I guess I wonder if in that way, maybe there is some saving grace somehow where, you know, the app, you know, persists on because maybe the media coverage there of Dobrook, you know, won't be as, I don't know, you know, focused, right? So, so, yeah, I don't really know how to exactly think about this, just

because of the sheer star power that Doberk brings to this as a YouTuber and as a global YouTuber and what that means for all the relationships that are involved here. But to bring about to your original point about have we ever seen something quite like this, especially so soon after announcing funding, I don't remember anything quite like this. Well, and then the sort of rule of thumb is like if you see a Spark Capital running, screaming from this situation, then maybe there is worse to come. You know, we know nothing whatsoever. But it would see, you wouldn't walk away from an investment a month later.

Like they. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you're right. I mean, not only are you pointing at all the sponsors, you know, pulling out, but to have a major funder pull out as well is really unusual. And I think does speak to, you know, you know, there must have been some things that were on earth behind the scenes or whatever.

And I don't want to, like, overly speculate, you know, it's a pretty shitty situation overall. But I just think that it's, for our purposes, interesting to look at this as a new wave of kind of, you know, founder, creator hybrid in the creator economy who happens to have an app because building technology is not quite what it was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, where, again, you could sort of build a photo sharing app that had the minimal features. But because it was connected to the cloud, it was kind of a big deal. deal. You know, like this is like before AWS and before, you know, iOS and Swift UI and all these tools that made it much easier to sort of, you know, build and launch faster. And so you do need that star power to kind of break out. And when that goes away, are there ultimate consequences? You know, they can really imperil the fate of one of these products. Well, and that's kind of interesting because I would almost say, and maybe you could point me to where I'm wrong on this,

this was maybe the first one that was this high profile. And so I almost, wonder if this is going to, if this was a trend that was going to happen, but then all of a sudden is basically dead in the water because it's like, okay, we can't take the risk on these YouTubers and these influencers because if we haven't done our due diligence, you know, I wonder if there are different elements or aspects to kind of like the whole cancer culture meme in the sense that if you are on YouTube and you live most of your life, kind of recording your life and putting it out there and being, you know, moderately offensive to lots and lots of people,

if you do really open up a lot more, I mean, honestly, just, you know, minutes and hours of video of stupid shit that you've said, that ultimately is, like, really offensive and could be downright, you know, racist or sexist or misogynist or any of those things in a period in a moment where we're really, I don't know, having like a reckoning with how awful people have been towards each other

for a long time. And at least when it comes to funding things and the way money moves around, And it just feels like the due diligence is going to be, you know, a little bit different on this. But yeah, if anybody has anything that they want to add to this, any, you know, knowledge, any perspective, you know, we'd love to hear from you really quickly. And then we'll move on to the next segment. So if you got some to say, raise your hand now, I don't think Brian and I would, you know, pretend to sort of be experts on this topic.

But we saw this. And again, just given how we had talked about it recently, felt like it was important and relevant to bring up just to even, you know, check our own kind of, I don't know. We were pretty positive and sort of guffed about it a little bit. You know, so, all right, not seeing any hands right now. So happy to move on, Brian, if you want to move on. Yes. So attempt number two. And this is more in your wheelhouse. Great. Yes.

Speaking of hot startups, that people were waiting on to see what the next act might look like, Zoom has today announced an SDK to help developers build Zoom. video services into other apps, quoting TechCrunch. One clear sign of a maturing platform is when the company exposes the services it uses for its own tools to other developers. Zoom has been doing that for some time, introducing Zoom apps last year and the marketplace to distribute and sell those apps. Today, the company introduced a new SDK software development kit to help developers embed

Zoom video services inside other applications. If you want to include video in your app, you could try to do that. try and code it yourself, or you could simply take advantage of Zoom's expertise in this area and use the SDK to add video to the application and save a lot of time and effort. The company envisions applications developers embedding video in social, gaming, or retail applications where including video could enhance the user experience. For example, a shop owner could show different outfits to an online shopper in a live video feed and discuss their tastes in real time.

Zoom's CTO Brendan Idelson said the SDK is actually part of a broader set of services designed to help developers take advantage of all the developer tooling that the company has been developing in recent years. As part of that push, the company is also announcing a central developer portal. In addition, the company said that it wanted to give developers more data about how people are using these Zoom features in their applications, so they will be providing a new analytics dashboard with usage statistics, end quote. So as I've been saying recently, devs, revs your engines. Okay. So, you know, it's interesting. I just hold up the, so developer.com.

Zoom.us is the place to go to sort of learn a little bit more about this. And, you know, I sort of listened to the segment in the clip and, you know, had sort of a high level overview. Like, oh, okay, finally. Like, you know, like, I know Zoom had been allowing people to build apps previously into the Zoom experience, but this is building, you know, Zoom into third-party apps. And of course, I've got some background of this having worked on Google's developer platform and also Uber's. And when I was at Uber, you know, one of our teams, the Uber developer platform team, specific roles and responsibilities was essentially to distribute Uber trips into more and more apps. So, for example, one of the integrations was with the United app so that when you would land at an airport, you know, you'd be able to book a car directly from within the United app, or at least there'd be a button that would then take you into a pre-filled, you know, bide hail inside of Uber.

And so that was pretty straightforward. One of the things that is different that I'm noticing right away. And I don't know, I feel like there's a bunch of today's topics are kind of all of these big transitional shifts that seem to be going on in the industry. In this case, specifically, when you dig into

the developer docs, one of the first things that you'll notice with the SDK is that you have to buy it. And I don't remember, and I know I don't work in the video space, and I know obviously video is very expensive to produce. But the way that this works is that you either pay $1,000 a year to get access to this SDK or you pay as you go. And so you get 10,000 minutes that are included per month or 0.0035 per minute used is essentially the rate. And the fact that this is so built into like a business

model for Zoom, I think is really fascinating because it really positions them more as, you know, kind of like a telephony provider. And they are then, therefore more competitive with the Agora folks who are, of course, backending the clubhouse experience or Twilio or Mux or other video call providers. And I think that's really interesting because my mind sort of was originally going to, oh, this seems somewhat competitive with Snapchat and what Snap's trying to do with the camera as a platform. And this is a little bit different. I need to dig into the specifics of what the capabilities are of this API.

and the SDK specifically, but the fact that they're charging out of the gate like that, I think is really interesting because one, I guess it just presumes that they have such market share that they don't need to really worry about convincing developers. If people want to use this, not only are they going to be paying for it immediately, but maybe that presumes that the downstream developers

have to figure out how they're going to monetize their apps as well. So this just points to an acceleration of what's overall happening in the technology world where it's no longer about making everything free and burning the VC dollars to essentially get growth, but it's saying from the outset, no, no, no, we're a business, and you're going to pay us for the value that we're providing,

and you need to figure out downstream how you're going to make money with this. Well, so let me, because, you know, as I will always say, I'm nowhere near a dev. I read in that segment that it's like, well, you can add video to your app or whatever, live video, or you can just do this so it's much easier. So are they solving a very, very difficult problem? them. You know what I'm saying?

Like from a developer's perspective, is that such a huge thing that they can charge for it? Yeah. I mean, I would say a couple things. You know, the one thing that I think Zoom has done pretty well, at least in my experience, using a bunch of different video services is just like they have a really robust, reliable, like video CDN. And so essentially they're able to provide, you know, video that feels, or at least like a video experience that handles a huge number of participants. It has a lot of different capabilities in terms of the way. in which you can mux or combine or multiplex videos into a single stream. And one of the things that I've been noticing, and this is more, I don't know if it's paranoia

or like accurate, but in a lot of cases when I'm on calls with people where the quality of the video actually doesn't look that good, I'm noticing what looks like essentially like deep fake, deep dream style video artifacts where they may actually be using a codec that is way more efficient than the standard sort of web RTC that's available in the browser. So they're adding in a layer of interpolation that down samples a video without losing quality because they're actually using artificial intelligence, then that does make this more resilient, more robust over the various network conditions that most people will find themselves in. So in that sense, that is a pretty good quality. Alex has something to say. I'm going to bring him up because I'm sure he can, actually,

he has some good experience that'll disabuse me of whatever I'm seeing. incorrectly. Invite to speak. There we go. Alex, please tell me how I'm wrong. Well, first, how you doing? Good. How are you? It was a really interesting observation you made and the analogy that you're drawing around Twilio because on the one hand, absolutely, there are SDKs that are free and developer programs that are free and even APIs that are free because what that tends to do is drag in the customer base and you build out these network effects. So for example, in a last job, like at Intuit, for example, the SDK is free. You want to encourage integration of QBO, QuickBooks Online, into the experience of third-party apps. There's a baseline assumption,

though, which is there's an end customer that is paying for QuickBooks Online somewhere along the chain and that integration then is delivering value to the QBO customer and more value because of these integrated products and back to the third party. Yep. What I'm hearing from you and I think it's an important point to remind myself of is that this strategy is a, this is a brand new market that is opening up. A third party out that wants to use that capability has to pay for it somehow. not about Zoom customer acquisition. I'm assuming, and actually I don't know, was this a white

labeled end customer experience, or do you have to become a customer of Zoom as the end end customer of the integration? That's a good question. And I think that it's, you know, from my quick read of it, if you want to build your own Zoom, then you can build your own Zoom. So basically that would be white labeled and essentially it's like Twilio. And so you don't even know, you know, or like Vonage, like who's providing the video behind the scenes. And in this case, it happens to be Zoom. And so they're just sort of like your pipeline provider for that service. Yeah.

Yeah. And then I think that your analysis is correct. I think, you know, the analogy around Quilio is another telephony or communication service that you don't want to build for yourself. You don't want to necessarily, it's not about customer acquisition for Zoom for the end customer. It's about third-party developers as the customer paying for the service. So that makes a total bunch of sense.

And so I appreciate you actually pointing that out. I would have skipped past that detail, having not read it on my service. So yeah, actually, I'm reading, I'm reading the, there's a comparison between the video SDK versus the client SDK. And one of the things that is important here is in the client SDK, you're essentially bringing the full Zoom experience into your app. And so that can be like the meeting interface or, you know, you just want to initiate like a video call. Well, it's sort of video calls handled by Zoom, right? Whereas if, again, you want to build a competitor or you want to build, you know, a Discord clone and you want to have video calls in it, then you can essentially white label, Zoom with your own brand.

And so then you as the developer are paying, you know, Zoom for that capability. And then it's up to you to figure out how you monetize that, whether it's in-game, you know, purchases or whether it's, you know, charging your clients or maybe it's enterprise licensing or whatever it is. So, yeah, that's exactly right. So I'm glad to hear that validated. Perfect. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks. Before we leave this, can you explain to me then functionally what, um, Snap is offering developers differently. Yeah. So, and I feel like I'm going to fuck this up too because I'm, again, like you, I'm not a developer. But I read these things. I follow them and I know enough to be dangerous without, you know, being able to break too many things.

And I would say that what the SNAP SDK allows you to do is to either build things into the SNAP camera, sort of, you know, whether it's face effects or things like that, or to bring the SNAP camera as an SDK into your own product and to do, different integrations that way. You know, if anybody has specifics about the SNAP SDK, I'm sure there are folks actually in the audience who have possibly built things with it. You know, please again, like correct us. We're here learning in public too. But I see this as being quite different.

Like to me, I think the SNAP brand is still very, very important to their offering. And so therefore, the major difference here is that Zoom is offering quite a bit, you know, is doing something a lot more like Twilio or Vonage where you never even see their brand. And so that's a much different play than. the snap camera or like snap lenses or even bitmoji would be a good example of the types of developer products and offerings that snap offers so people can basically build with the lego blocks of snap without actually diminishing the snap brand or and this is me going way out on a limb is it the sort of um the analogy of uh increasing the GDP of video in the stripe sense where

they don't care. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. So anything that you can do, and, you know, video is so hard, at least, you know, from the developers that I've talked to, it's sort of like time zones and all that. Like, there's just some things that you kind of want a library or you want someone else to take care of like all the stuff that gets, you know,

it's hard. Like it's one thing, and maybe maybe one thing to help sort of, you know, to relate to this differently. It's one thing to, let's say, build an app that has, you know, video in it and you do some testing on your local machine. and it works, right? The real difference is when you start making phone calls or going between different types of networks or different network topologies or where you're going from, you know,

like a fiber network down to like 3G and you have to kind of like maintain coherence amongst all those things, right? So quality of service becomes really, really important. And so you want to use a reliable video provider that charges you fairly for access. And I will note, you know, and I don't have the economics kind of awareness to say whether that is a good or bad deal, but it is interesting that Zoom is choosing to charge by the minute or for an annual license, you know, which $1,000 sounds high given the cost of the Apple developer account license, which I think is like $100 or whatever. However, if you go and

build an app and you sell it in the app store, Apple's going to make money off of that downstream thing. Whereas in the case of Zoom, you go build an app and you charge. a thousand dollars a minute, you know, for phone calls and you'll happen to, you know, find some customers who are in crypto or something to sell it to, then you keep all that revenue, right? So there's no rev split between it. And so it really is just a service that you're consuming. And so charging by the minute means that Zoom doesn't really care the quality or the bandwidth, at least as far as I can tell, that's being consumed by the end user. And that's also really interesting because if you think about how video is going to only increase in usage

over the next several years, and that bandwidth is going to increase with the rollout of 5G and with new phones, then that puts them in a very interesting position because maybe as a developer, you can have more either reliable or predictable pricing relative to charging for bandwidth or megabytes or gigabytes of, you know, yeah, transfer.

I'm going to do a transition that says, speaking of Apple, but before I do, Chris, if you want to remind everyone what we're doing here. Yes, thank you. So you are, I don't want to say halfway through because this time, you know, maybe you're a third of the way through. This is the TechMeme Ride Home experience where every so often and maybe aspirational someday we'll do it every day.

Brian and I basically break down our favorite and most interesting topics of the day from the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. We go into each topic in a little more detail to put it a little more in context and to help both explain and digest the types of things that are going on in the world of tech. Now, speaking of Apple, Caredown of Apple's HomePod Mini has revealed a sensor that measures temperature and humidity inside it. That sensor is currently disabled, but yeah, looks like we might have some new home kit features incoming. Quoting Mark German in Bloomberg,

the Cupertino-California-based technology giant never disclosed this component, and the device currently lacks consumer-facing features that use it. The company has internally discussed using the sensor to determine a room's temperature and humidity, so internet-connected thermostats can adjust different parts of a home based on current conditions, according to people familiar with the situation. The hardware could also let the HomePod Mini automatically trigger other actions, say turning a fan on or off, depending on the temperature. The new capabilities would be a particular boon to an Apple software system called HomeKit,

that controls thermostats, lights, locks, plugs, and other devices in the home. HomeKit works with fewer gadgets than similar software from Amazon and Google, and Apple doesn't make its own smart home hardware beyond the HomePod and Apple TV streaming box. However, there are about 40 thermostats featured on Apple's website that are compatible with HomeKit. The sensor measuring 1.5 by 1.5 millimeters is buried in the bottom edge of the HomePod Mini's plastic fabric-wrapped case near its power cable. The component's location was confirmed by I Fix It, which took apart one of the speakers after an inquiry from Bloomberg News. The sensor is made by Texas Instruments and is called the HDC 2010 humidity and temperature digital sensor, according to Tech Insights, a firm that

analyzes components inside of electronics. The part is situated relatively far from the device's main internal components, meaning it is designed to measure the external environment rather than the temperature of the speaker's other electronics. Many mobile devices include sensors that can trigger the device to slow performance or disable features to stop components overheating. While rare, this isn't the first time Apple has slipped a dormant piece of technology into its devices. The 2008 iPod Touch had a Bluetooth chip, but support for Bluetooth connectivity was enabled

the following year via software. Apple typically releases major HomePod software updates annually in the fall. It's unclear if or when Apple will switch on. the temperature sensor, but its presence in HomePod mini units that have already been sold suggests that this is just a matter of time. And Apple's spokeswoman declined to comment, end quote. By the way, it did slip through the cracks because of weekend timing and cadence and whatnot, but I will take this opportunity to note that Apple has officially discontinued the original HomePod to focus instead going forward only on the HomePod Mini. Apple will provide HomePod owners

software updates and support via AppleCare, but yeah, big swing and a miss here for Apple in the smart speaker market. They were late. They came in at the high end and expensive, and now they better hope that the mini can carve out a niche for itself, maybe with new features like this. Yeah. So it's funny, when the first news of this, I would say specifically of the HomePod being discontinued, you know, came out. I remember I got into. like this little criffleffle on Twitter about whether or not you could consider the home pod a success or not. And I believe one of the arguments that was being made against me was that, you know, some nine million units had sold, which accounted for, was it that or was it 300 million? I don't know.

It was like some large, maybe three million units were sold, which then accounted for 900 million dollars in revenue. I think that's roughly what it was. And, you know, someone can check my numbers. But the point was, you know, was that the home pod, even though it's being discontinued after some period of time, was still a success. And I want to push back on that. And one of the reasons, I suppose, is... Not a success. Not a success. Is because of little discoveries like this.

You know, like, I don't know if it's like a lack... I don't know, but before I bring into this, I just want to hear from you, Brian, like, where does this story sort of sit with you relative to all the other Apple stories and all the other hardware things that you cover? Like, how do you receive this? It's weird to me,

Because didn't we do a story recently about how Sonos is maybe resurgent? Yes. And one of the things that I read when I was researching for this this morning was like, well, this is essentially seeding the high-end speaker market, the soundbar market, the, you know, to Sonos, right? So maybe that's why Sonos has been researching recently. But what that brings back to me is that Apple came in at the high end. They did come in at the Sonos' bows end. And that is not what was going to ever win this game. And I'm just, I continue to be perplexed as to why for their purposes they thought that would win for them.

You know what I mean? I do. And I imagine the reason why they thought that that would work for them is because they always kind of have this playbook. you know, which is to sell high and to sell to their, you know, most faithful users and that eventually they'll release sort of a downstream product. I mean, it's the Uber Playbook as well, you know, start out with like Uber Black and figure out how it works with, you know, a more discerning clientele and then sort of go mass market. But I think to your point, the way in which, and I think this is one of the things that came out of the conversation that we had then

was that the major flaw in that strategy with the home pod. is that the home pod is something that you only consume and experience when you're at home. So if you're a baller and you want to spend your money on something, you probably want to spend it on something you're going to be seen in, whether it's your Tesla or whether it's your AirPods, you know, even like the AirPods Max are a better example of sort of wearing the Apple jewelry in social settings. Whereas the home pod is a sort of functional thing that's a little bit like a heater, but makes noise instead.

And you sort of put it, you know, someplace where, you know, it looks like a potter without plants. And, you know, you kind of like set it and forget it. So from that perspective, yes, of course, if you want to live in the Apple bubble, then it kind of makes sense. But in this case, I just don't think that that allure relative to the other products that were out there really was compelling enough. So you just said something that almost like was exactly what I wanted to say, which is the analogy of jewelry and bling is imagine, remember, remember when the Apple Watch first came out, right? And there was a $10,000 gold. Right.

So what is the Apple Watch now functionally? It is functionally a glorified accessory to your iPhone. It is essentially a more expensive Fitbit that does more things that is maybe nicer looking than a Fitbit and more stylish, right? Yep. But I think that what happened here is kind of similar, which is that they approached the market

that they thought there was a high end for and there just really isn't. I just like, I don't know that the way that you approach buying like a home theater or a home speaker system really is the same like as the consideration process for other Apple or computing products.

Right. And so I guess like I have Sonos products and once I sort of went down that path, you know, for me, wow, this is like so hard to unpack because there's so many layers of, you know, the music business and the voice assistant business and all the rest of it. Like one of the things that I love about my sonos is how well it integrates with Spotify. And I have, you know, 10 to 11 years of history on Spotify. If I were an Apple music user, then perhaps I would find that the home pod was compelling. But I just don't know that the overlap between people who, you know, are Apple music users. And by the way, by the way, that could be more. be the one thing that killed this product. For all we know, it was being so stubborn to integrate Spotify, that could be the one thing. Okay, do you think that they were certain or do you think that Spotify didn't want to do a deal,

which was it? It was probably they want to push their own service, right? You know what? Actually, I had never thought about that to this point. Yeah. Given where Spotify is with them right now, maybe they would help the deal this whole time. Yeah, okay. Yeah, and the reason why I say this is because one of the things, so Spotify, I think, is very much a

course. And you actually brought this up on, I think, Friday show about the Rebel Alliance that seems to be forming, which formed here on Clubhouse, between Facebook, Shopify and Spotify. So essentially, you've got those three kind of outsiders that are going up against kind of, you know, I don't know if it's the Apple Death Star or the Google Death Star. I bet the Death Star probably runs on Android. So anyways. It's just any platforms. All platforms are Death Stars to them, essentially. Okay. Well, yes. And I guess what I was thinking, though, is that one of the things, that's really interesting about Spotify's service ambitions that we don't fully understand is what it looks like when they become more of an advertising player.

And more specifically, what are they doing with their voice assistant? I don't know if it's, you know, hey, Spotify, something like that sort of works, but they certainly allow you to search by voice and there are increasing pieces of evidence in their mobile apps and especially for integrations on car products. where you can start to talk to the Spotify assistant. And if they are moving in the direction of having voice interactive ads, whether they're in podcasts or whether they're in music, then that suggests that they need to actually be in a prime position

to be able to receive voice commands through the speakers that they show up on. Now, that's if, you know, Apple was like, no, like Siri's going to be the voice assistant to rigor of, you know, the HomePod and all of our other Apple products, and that would actually put Spotify in a pretty defensive position. And so Spotify was the service that people wanted who had the HomePod, and Apple wouldn't allow it or Spotify wouldn't allow it. Then that right there would be like, well, I don't want this because I can't even access the music that I want to play on this hugely expensive speaker

that I just spent my money on. Can I go in a completely different direction? Please. I think I made my point. Basically, when I say that they came in high end and these things are commodities, I think that, again, in that piece we just played, where, okay, now we can, all right, the HomePod Mini, we're going to turn on these things that will work with HomeKit. I think that has been, especially Amazon's game from day one, is like, we'll give you a $30 a little, you know, tiny nubbin that you'll put in every corner of your room.

Right. And so what perplexes me again is why Apple came in at the high end when the real way to do it is $30 nubbins that you put in every corner of your room that then mixes with your – I don't understand why Apple isn't seeing the home part. Instead, we're not going to sell a mass market product. And even if it fucks our strategy, we have to maintain the Louis Vuitton of computing devices. And that's our point. Okay, let me ask you this. Yeah. How much of this is, as we're supposedly going to see this year, that finally we're going

to get laptops that people will actually want to use again, how much of this is the D. Johnny Iving of Apple product design. Well, oh, that's a weird thing. I understand what you're saying in terms of, you know, adding back ports and taking away sort of this, I don't know, iconic classic touch bar. Well, I'm saying it on the level of you just said, we, we, we, We won't do anything if it's not perfect. I see.

No, that's not what I said. I said that in order to maintain the perception of the brand as being high quality, Apple needs to sell products that are expensive, scarce. They are the NFT of computers. I mean, computers and the hardware is made of sand. It's made of silicon. It's like the most abundant mineral or whatever on the planet. But Apple has figured out how to put enormous premium on all of these devices and products

through a mix of design and marketing and aesthetics and et cetera. Whereas, again, and it's funny because I feel like I'm sort of repeating myself in the post that I wrote first about the AirPods, you know, which were the sex sticks that fuck your ears. And then the other one where I wrote about how Silicon Valley didn't understand the Amazon Echo or the Echo show, which basically was like this like toaster of and sort of, you know, design aesthetic, but was like the MySpace of voice assistant products because, it just wasn't trying that hard. And so it was super accessible to anybody

that just wanted to have like an appliance in their house without feeling like it was like super high tech, high design, hoity-toity, you know, nose up in the air kind of thing. So I'm sort of supporting your point that the reason why Apple can't get into the commodity hardware business where, and I don't know if this is the same problem

with their tile competitor, you know, and why that hasn't come out yet. But like their things have to be expensive. Like you have to buy, you know, like a USB cable for like $29, you know, when it probably costs like three cents to make, right? Like that's sort of like the markup. And Amazon, meanwhile, just wants ubiquity. They want to have an Alexa assistant in every nook and cranny, you know, of your, of your, of your microwave, you know, your, you know, your clock. They gave it away, right? No one can build anything

on Siri right now, except for Apple. And I think that that's a really important distinction in terms of the type of motes and the structures of the castles that these companies have. built. So when it comes to the home pod, it was a failure because they just couldn't meet the market where the market expects things to be now, whereas the home pod mini at least possibly can get them there. I just don't know why anybody would really want it unless you're like a college student or something and maybe you're extending your relationship with Syria. Like it doesn't fit in overall, but let's bring it back to like what the story was about, which is about finding the sensor, not in the home pod, but in the home pod mini. Therefore, the home pod mini may actually sort of double,

you know, be a double agent for a type of Nest style, you know, competitor where, you know, Apple obviously sees that they need to win the home and to be, to have a useful virtual assistant so that you can actually control your home with HomeKit. I don't know about you, but like, I, um, I've set up my house and I've set up my partner's house as, um, like Alexa assistant, uh, smart homes. You know, we can control our lifex bulbs and all the rest using the A-named assistant. Whereas I've tried HomeKit and I can't fucking make sense of it. It doesn't make any sense.

So I still think that Apple probably sees that they need to be in the home and they need to move forward with their home kit kind of, I don't know. There's a bunch of, what is Ziegby and a bunch of other protocols and standards for wiring up these devices, but they just don't seem to have the pedigree to be able to sort of get themselves down to the level where most consumers are at. Well, and I'll say this. I made no secret about the fact that I don't want,

Amazon in my home, especially because Amazon already knows all of my home spending, so I don't need to give them any more data. If any, forget about Facebook knowing everything about you. Forget about Google knowing everything about you. Amazon's going to know the most about us, especially our spending habits, what's happening inside our house, our speakers and things like that. So I would welcome HomeKit actually. didn't I do that story about the Logitech or whatever? Yeah. Yeah, doorbell thing, like, to replace the ring doorbell. Yeah, I'd rather have an Apple doorbell,

because in theory, I believe them that they're not going to sell me up. Someday we'll have a big conversation about this, about like, this sort of, I don't know, I don't know if it's like existential dread or just this fear or concern that by Amazon knowing these things about you, it's going to somehow make your life worse, Whereas probably if they know more about you, they're going to give you better recommendations and they're just going to anticipate what your needs are and you won't even need to like spend time ordering things.

They're just be like, oh, Brian, like you're running out of this in two days. Ordered it for you. You know, if you don't want it, just leave it on your front door. We'll come get it, you know, because you have like an Amazon door lock or something. You know what? Maybe sometime this week I'll talk about me trying to get an Amazon credit card this week and then canceling it and then realizing that that was dumb because they already know my spending happens. Anyway, let me put a pin on this by asking you what you think of the home pod specifically,

whether it's a line that goes forward with just the mini or a home pod sort of thing. Is this a huge failure, cul-de-sac? What do you think of Apple's efforts in specifically the smart speaker space? You know, it's a really great question, and there are a couple different ways that I would approach it. one is just this question of the relationship that somebody has to music through the devices that they listen to it through. Sorry, there's a whole bunch of propositions there or something. But like, does the things that you put in your ears or do the speakers that you have in

your walls or next to your TV or in your kitchen or in the bathroom or in your car, do the speakers and the maker of the speakers make a difference in how you feel about the music that you're consuming. So I use Spotify in all sorts of different places, right? I don't use Apple music. But if I had Apple branded, you know, speakers like a HomePod or HomePod mini and I just had them throughout my house, does that give me a deeper sense of satisfaction and a greater feeling of affinity for Apple? I think the possibility, you know, the possible answer is yes. However, like Apple is clearly moving into entertainment and media in major ways, you know, from Apple TV to, and doing things with spatial audio,

but maybe they realized that the home pod itself doesn't build enough of an emotional relationship that a commodity speaker is sufficient for most people's listening habits. And that owning the ear through the AirPods and the AirPods Pro and the AirPods Max is actually a much more intimate private context that they need to really invest in. And so maybe between the HomePod and the AirPods Max,

they realize that the AirPods Max is going to be a much better way to cement that relationship and to give people a sense of feeling, you know, of wearing their apple blingness kind of in a social context, uh, that the home pod itself as a large product just doesn't really make sense. Economically, it failed in terms of their typical playbook and so therefore they can move on from it.

Um, again, I don't know where the home pod mini fits into this, but given up the name is, you know, has home in it. It does imply that you could at least maybe use this, as your Siri Activator, you know, and then where it goes from there, I don't know. So, yeah, I would consider it to be, well, the HomePod, as it has been known, a lost cause.

And I don't know that, you know, they got much out of it. Alex, do you want to jump in here and offer anything? The thought that I had as you were speaking there was the comparison around the visual experience versus the audio experience. So just as a consumer without analyzing this space deeply, for me, the top line, the HomePod and the HomePod mini, my headline was, well, it's just not going to work with Spotify in the way that I'm going to use Spotify. And Spotify is my preferred music service. And there's over 150 million paying subscribers that are also paying for Spotify. Now, when I go to video, like I can't watch Netflix on any Apple device. I realize that the audio experience is different.

And so I think it's like strategically I understand why Apple would want to like make it difficult for competitors and spaces that want to play. But I think it's shit. I mean like it's bollocks. I'm not going to buy a home pod. Like until they do a deal with Spotify that just makes it easy for me to use Spotify, it's a very straightforward consumer decision. Just don't use Spotify. And I don't know. There's obviously more complexity than that.

But it's different. The only thing is, like, why are they treating that differently compared to, for example, iTunes and movies versus Netflix and all the other video providers? I'm not sure I understand that reasoning. I mean, it seems like, and I don't know this for sure, but, you know, when I've listened to Peter Kafka, there seems to be a lot of back-end and backroom deals that go on that enable those streaming services on different platforms.

And, you know, there's some shady stuff that happens there for sure because of the money that's, you know, exchanging hands. And I think, you know, Brian, you've, I think, covered this around Roku and, you know, of course, the whole brouhaha about HBO Max being available there or not being available and so forth. I mean, to put a really fine point on it, it's that there is so much money to be made because everyone cuts these deals where if on your platform you sign up for HBO, or Cinemax or Peacock or whatever, you get such a sweet cut of it that it's like, it's just raining money on video. And so I would speculate, and someone like Kafka would know way more about this than I would.

I feel like that that is not the case. Like music is locked down. Like all of those deals, it's not this wide open sort of affiliate relationship where, oh, sure, you can get a taste if you, we'll give you six months of this person's subscription if they stick around for six months.

It just seems to be that. In video, it's raining money. And I would speculate that in audio, all of those deals have been negotiated 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and there's not that much money to be made. Yeah, you know, so I had two more quick thoughts about this. They're quick. You know, Spotify recently just put out their loud and clear sort of music advocacy site where they're putting out what the, I think it's loud and clear. dot Spotify.com. And in it, they've got a bunch of sort of interesting, you know, anecdotes and some data and

stuff like that. And they have this really, you know, pretty convincing video as well as an infographic that shows where essentially like $100, you know, of music streaming money goes to. And, you know, a very small percentage of it ends up, of course, going to the artist. And there's all these people sort of in the middle that take their cut. And Spotify is among them. So it may be the case that Spotify wasn't willing to do business with Apple because Apple wanted to charge, you know, access to basically like home pod users and Spotify, we make so little money

as it is, I mean, you know, relative to whatever they want to make, that we're not going to put our product or... That's entirely possible. That's entirely possible. Yeah. So I think, and, you know, the other way to think about it, too, actually, I don't know about this so much, but I was thinking, like, if I buy a home pod and I don't have access to a music service, then I'm more than likely going to take whatever is on my iPhone that connects to the the home pod. I don't know. I mean, I assume that there's, I know you can do Bluetooth to the HomePod.

But at that point, it's almost like worthless, right? Like, you kind of want to have like a high-quality signal for transmitting audio, in which case you're probably going to want to use Apple's protocols in the back end. Exactly.

I mean, that was where I landed. It's like I can get any, any speaker, high-quality speaker, but why am I buying the home-pot is part of the Apple ecosystem, blah, blah, blah. Like, if I can only connect Spotify via Bluetooth,

well, what's the point? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Totally. So I think it's in so many levels, it's just apples, I don't know. On the one hand, you could say arrogance. On the other hand, you know, adherence to certain standards means that it just was not a product that could really meet the market where the market demands it to meet them. So, okay. I think we can put that story of bed. Let's move on to, I think we've got two more week and long reads, right? Yeah, well, and here's what I want to do because I went through the whole room and it's all friends here. It's all people that, that have. least follow me, including Owen, who I met early on in my podcasting career. So, Owen, I'd love if you stepped up at any point, but no, no pressure. So, Chris, I can do, I can read, I can play both of these long-read segments. Is there one, oh, thank you, Owen. And after I play these,

please, please chip in. Is there one that you like more, the O'Reilly one, or the Moore's Law, Sam Aldman one? You know, it's not so much about which I like more. I think it's about the statements that are contained in each. Again, that kind of to me speak to the future and the past. And these are two somewhat different views of where things are going, both relative to Silicon Valley, but also relative to the nature of, I would just say the human experience,

especially as relates to work and automation. And what we're going to find ourselves spending time on and who's going to I guess benefit, you know, from this new world or not. And by the way, if anybody wants to go check out those posts, if you go to my Twitter profile under the PIN tweet, I've linked to both of these long reads. I don't know. They just like, you know, I ended up reading them on my Kindle because they are, you know, as it suggests long. But I just, there was so much kind of, you know, richness and meadiness that I think I just want to kind of address them together and see where the conversation goes. And actually, you know, Owen, I think you might, I don't know if you've read them

also, but have an interesting kind of historical perspective on kind of where we've been and where this stuff might be going. So here's what I'm going to do. There's no easy, since these aren't segments, this is from the Longreeds. It's going to be an abrupt thing. I'll play them both, and it'll be an abrupt kickback to the room. So here we go. For the weekend Longreid suggestions, and first up, let's do a couple of deep thinks from a

couple of noted tech deep thinkers. Tim O'Reilly wades into the question of if Silicon Valley is over, and he identifies, as he puts it four ways, the party might indeed be coming to an end. Number one, consumer internet entrepreneurs lack many of the skills needed for the life sciences revolution that he feels is coming. Number two, internet regulation is upon us. Number three, climate response is capital intensive and inherently local. And number four, the end of what he calls the betting economy. Let me quote from point number one, though. Prediction. The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and material science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been

to the late 20th and early 21st century. Why might this mark the end of Silicon Valley as we know it? First, the required skills are different. Yes, machine learning, statistical analysis, and programming are all needed, but so is deep knowledge of relevant science. The hubs where that knowledge can be found are not the special province. of Silicon Valley, suggesting that other regions may take the lead. Second, many of the markets where fortunes will be made are regulated. Navigating regulated markets also takes skills that are conspicuously missing in Silicon Valley. Finally, as Theranos demonstrated so vividly, it is harder to sustain a hype balloon in a scientific enterprise than in many of the markets where Silicon

Valley has prospered. Many Silicon Valley investors have been lucky rather than smart. They may not do so well in a world where capital must be directed towards solving hard problems rather than toward winning a popularity contest, end quote. And next, Sam Altman has an essay up saying that advances in AI could lead to a Moore's law-like revolution for basically everything, quote, the best way to increase societal wealth is to decrease the cost of goods from food to video games. Technology will rapidly drive that decline in many categories. Consider the example of semiconductors and Moorslaw. For decades, chips became twice as powerful for the same

price about every two years. In the last couple of decades, costs in the U.S. for TVs, computers, and entertainment have dropped, but other costs have risen significantly, most notably those for housing, health care, and higher education. Redistribution of wealth alone won't work if these costs continue to soar. AI will lower the costs of goods and services because labor is the driving costs at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own, from natural resources, mind, and refined on site, using solar power. The cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them.

Similarly, we can imagine AI doctors that can diagnose health problems better than any human, and AI teachers that can diagnose and explain exactly what a student doesn't understand. Moore's Law for Everything should be a rallying cry of a generation whose members can't afford what want. It sounds utopian, but it's something technology can deliver and in some cases already has. Imagine a world where for decades everything, housing, education, food, clothing, etc., became half as expensive every two years, end quote. So I just, I don't know, like these two pieces taken together, you know, represent these future-facing visions that are clearly technologically, you know, driven and enabled and

drenched. And there are huge ramifications for humans and the human experience and the way in which we conceive of and perform work and also the types of education and skills that we need to be giving people. And one, it's just like, oh my God, we are just like so not prepared. And the pace at which this is going to come at us, you know, is sort of like climate change. It's sort of going to be upon us. And we're going to adapt very quickly. And, you know, if we've learned anything just by sort of observing what has happened with this, you know, pandemic, we are not. We don't not live in a sort of coherent, you know, humanistic society where we kind of all have each other's back and realize that we're all in this together. It's quite the opposite of that. And yet,

you know, what Sam is proposing is that through technological innovation and artificial intelligence being deployed specifically, the need for human labor, which is in some ways, you know, I don't know, like faulty or just kind of unreliable in some respects will be replaced with more methodical, you know, machines that are really good at doing the same thing over and over again and getting, better and better at it. But the humans will be necessary, at least in my optimistic view, to be better at synthesizing information and to see cross-linkages between different areas and fields and to put those sort of artificial intelligences together to create combinatorial outcomes that the machines themselves would never be able to come up with on their own.

And I think what Tim O'Reilly is also pointing to is that the things that made Silicon Valley kind of have its own, again, gold rush-style economic boom the last 10 to 15 years may not necessarily be the thing that keeps us going because we're so focused on the way in which this boom has worked that we're not looking to, you know, again, he points to like the life sciences and granted he's quite close to that world, you know, or the green revolution that we're not actually well prepared for the opportunities that are going to come out of that. And so there will be a bit of a dispersion as these technologies. that have been developed out in Silicon Valley become more widely understood,

more widely deployed, and more widely adopted in more and more places. So it just, I don't know, it just gave me a real pause to kind of like really think about where we are, what we've just gone through, and what's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years. Hey, Owen. Hey, there. Thanks for. Any thoughts on that?

So many thoughts. I'll start with the Sam Altman piece because I've read that more closely. I thought it was a really beautiful kind of people. of abstract art as, you know. Like an NFT or something, yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, someone could sell this, you know, sell this for millions, and it's similarly valueless.

The reason why it's valueless, it brings the, you know, the utter naivete of Silicon Valley about politics fully to bear. Just an example. If you read through Sam Alton's piece, he says, oh, sure, this, you know, this grand idea to tax to tax wealth and land will probably cause property values to drop 15%. Well, that is a dagger in the heart of the middle class.

Now, it may not be a rational dagger, but it will be an emotional dagger. And no one is going to vote for that. No one's going to vote for that. You know, if anyone who dares will get voted out in the next election. Yes, like Alvin is completely right. I'm the son of an economist. Everything is saying makes economic sense. Like, yes, there will be a 15% drop in land values as people kind of grasp the impact of the tax.

And then they will bounce up because of the general kind of economic, you know, rising tide that AI will release. But we are not, as a society, good at long-term thinking and delayed gratification. And you just don't drop people's home values 15% and expect that. and not to freak out. So, you know, I think there's a lot of kind of beauty and simplicity. What Altman is proposing, there's absolutely no realism. So, wait, like to push back on that, because I, on the one hand, I agree with you that if we were relying on either rational choice or voting by the humans to go on that path,

it's not going to happen. But I think one of the things that if, you know, again, if you read those two pieces sort of together, and I realize you might be less familiar with the things that, Lorelli's talking about, it just feels that some of these things are going to start happening to us. And there's already this insane type of financialization that seems to be happening, obviously, in the digital realm. And, you know, I don't quite know how that's going to change things or shift things or shift power

dynamics because we're sort of minting money out of nowhere, which will give at least some set of people enormous powered influence that they haven't had before. And they can just, you know, start fucking things up because why not? you know, because they have the ability to. So I'm not saying it's good or bad. I don't really have like a judgment about that. It seems to me that there's going to be changes that are going to happen regardless. I sort of support your thesis that, you know, people who have wealth are not going to vote themselves out of wealth,

but I still think it's going to happen to people all the same. And so I think that's the thing where there seems to be some determinism in the move towards increasing adoption and use of artificial intelligence, especially in industries, where humans are just going to be kind of, you know, pushed out of some of these positions that they've been in before, and there will be a redistribution of wealth towards different things. Or do you think that that's not possible? I mean, I think that the effects of AI are, you know, absolutely, you know,

those are absolutely real. Like, every, you know, all of that is absolutely real. The question is, like, how do we bridge the gap? How do we as a society make the leap? I will say the thing that's given me some, optimism about basic income income is a pandemic because economic impact payments are basic income and they are they just are and they have made it societally acceptable it's gone from like a really weird out there concept that some people in Silicon Valley are talking about to something that

pretty much you know everyone has now experienced I think the latest you know the very last EIP was means tested but the the first couple rounds weren't. Right. And, you know, just like making it real in that way has kind of opened up some possibilities there. Because the child tax credit in addition to that, I think, is also a really good, you know, kind of test of this in a major way where it's like, you know, you've got kids, you know, it's, I mean, it will support so many, you know, parents, you know, obviously who are often, you know, women and who bear most of the brunt of the sort of pandemic economic impact, that hopefully that will actually kind of rebalance some of the scales here.

Obviously, it's not like a permanent fix or something, but it's, and it's obviously got a time horizon as well. To your point about kind of dipping our toe into the UBI waters, it really does feel like this is the first major test where we've kind of gotten around some of the early reactions to at least allow people to feel it. And they're like, oh, actually, this is kind of nice. I kind of like this. The problem is that we've been borrowing to make this. True. Right? On the argument that this is a crisis, this is a one-time cost.

But, you know, the flip side is we do have to fund the payments somehow. And I just... Well, but I mean, to Sam's point, though, right? If we're, either you fund the payments or you lower the cost of things over time through artificial intelligence and automation. And I don't, like, that's weird because then people aren't making money. but if the cost of things are going down thanks to this Moore's law for everything, then maybe what we have to pay back actually isn't quite as great

because the cost to produce those things isn't what it was previously. People, again, like a complete failure by Sam Alman to think about human psychology. Fear of loss is much greater than hope of gain. Yeah, yeah. And deflation, like prolonged deflation, if people hate inflation, they hate deflation much more. And by the way, deflation is deeply, anti-progressive.

Now, you balance that, of course, with the basic income, but still, it's not going to feel good if, you know, like, just, you know, like, okay, your iPhone is cheaper. Great. Your Coursera courses are cheaper. Great. You know, but like

your house is cheaper. Again, like, psychologically, that is not going to fly with the American middle class the way people have been, you know, trained for centuries culturally to value land, to value property, it just requires, like, you know, Sam is smart. He needs to talk to some, like, basic behavioral economists. He needs to talk to a few psychologists who have studied, you know, like, wealth and sentiment around, you know, property and income and, you know, and investment. And I think he'll come

back, you know, he could well come back from that with a much sounder plan. But this, this, the plan that he's espoused is a complete and utter psychological and political failure. Sounds like we need to get Noah Smith back here. Let me, let me bring the O'Reilly thing into this, because, um, again, I feel like we're kind of all shitting on the Altman piece, which I thought, was great and interesting. But it kind of felt to me like a Kurzweil piece. Like, you know, I read the age of spiritual machines and that's why I believe in tech. You know, like, and, you know, look, I think his time horizon was still 2030, so there's still time to go. But just by putting the, oh, Moore's Law for everything on stuff that felt a little too cute to me, right? I'm more

interested in O'Reilly's first point in his piece, which is that it's not that software is not going to be important. It's that his posit that life sciences, biology, chemistry, and things like that are going to be more important for the next 20 to 30 years. And so it's not going to be possible for, you know, well, it would be possible for a kid in a dorm room if they, if they're a biochemist or something like that to create the next trillion dollar company. But his point was essentially that what he sees coming for the next few decades in terms of what will really put a debt in the universe is going to be something that is not going to be just create a better social app or a different kind of social app. And there's going to be,

different skill sets involved. And that felt more plausible to me than the cute idea that there's going to be a Moore's law that will make education cheaper, that will make all of these things cheaper that Altman says. What do you think of that? Yeah. Can you just wind up, wind me up and let me go here? Okay.

I mean, like, this is an example of another, another guy who lives in his Web 2.0 bubble. and has not even wandered around the Bay Area, talking to people outside the Internet industry. Where is the largest biotech hub in the United States? It's San Francisco. By the way, runner up, San Diego, also in California. Like, you know, the coronavirus fight is happening right here in and around San Francisco, especially in South San Francisco,

where Genentech is based. Gilead, also Bay Area. Where was CRISPR invented? You see Berkeley. I mean, come on. Like the idea that the Bay Area, you know, forget Silicon Valley, but the Bay Area turns out is really good at biotech. And when you put those together,

when you put biotech and computers together into bioinformatics, like this is the natural center of that. Now, again, the pandemic has put all of this into doubt. because things that could go virtual now have gone virtual. But I think that people still will post-pandemic want to gather. I think there will be like natural clusters and centers. And by the way, the only sector of commercial real estate that is working in the Bay Area right now is biotech labs. I mean, for obvious reasons, but that work generally has to be done in person.

So that may, you know, that may actually not be for, you know, for any, like any stretch of the imagination. That may always be physical work done in a physical place. So I want to just actually add a little more context to the O'Reilly piece. As I know, you're less familiar with kind of like the contents. One of the things that I think he's pointing out is the way in which the funders of the consumer internet revolution and consumer apps and things like that, sort of are willing to fund things because they're imagining, you know, a 10 to 100x kind of outcome in some set number of years. In other words, the game of building kind of consumer social products, technology products, is fairly well understood and known relative to the

life sciences world where, and I'm sort of reading between the lines, I think, a little bit, where there's sort of more of a collaborative spirit in sharing different lab results and and working in a different way than what a lot of, you know, move fast and break things, you know, kind of companies are used to. Right. A skill set for that, to me, you know, having grown up on the East Coast, feels like a place like Boston is a little more suited to that type of long-term gestation of life science, evolution, and innovation, then what Silicon Valley wants, which is typically, you know,

to put a bunch of money in and get out relatively quickly and sort of move at that cadence. Right. Go from zero to a billion users in 18 months. Maybe the way I was reading that was, and maybe he's speaking to a specific audience, which might just be the VC audience, which, you know, so this is really inside baseball stuff. But also, I think it's speaking to founders, too, in the sense that it's, what I took away from that first point of that piece, and there's four points in that piece. So there's other things you can take from this, is that I think he was trying to say there's a different skill set. And you're right. He was saying, and maybe I agree with you, Owen, that he's saying, well, that's not in the Bay Area. And I agree with you.

I know people in biotech, and they're all in the Bay Area. But I think the main takeaway that I had was that there's a different skill set in terms of how founders need to think about it. and the skills that founders would have to bring to the table if this is going to be the next several decades. And also, like Chris is saying, not the timeline and also the expectations. It's not that you can go from a tam of zero to a billion users in 18 months. It's more that you have to invest the time to make these things happen. And it also be real, right? Because he brings up both Thernos and we work.

And essentially his point there is, and this is sort of like to his last point about the casino style or casino capitalism, you know, is that you essentially are building on prior rounds of funding to fuel growth that is somewhat vaporous in order to just, you know, get sort of the jet fuel exhaust needed to get into like the stratosphere. And in the life sciences world, you know, like, again, sort of Theranos being the anti-example, you have to have real demonstrated like proof that the thing that you're building and deploying, actually works and that it's been tested and that that just takes it's slower and the multiples are less because it's not all virtualized but that's kind of again like what he's talking about which is Brian to your point like the skill set that's needed which is more sort of an attitudinal adjustment about the way in which those types of innovations will occur relative to what we've become used to in terms of you know putting $10 million in and getting $100 million out like five years later and Owen I'm jumping in let me

jump in real quick because I just need to remind you that I do want to use this this weekend on the podcast so we are recording. Yes, absolutely. And Alex's mind. And Alex is well, thanks. Go ahead. Hey, thank you. Oh, yes, go ahead.

Sorry, did I answer? Alex, go ahead. So the one thought in this conversation on the O'Reilly point is that there are, centers of excellence around the world that aren't San Francisco, that aren't the Bay Area, that I think the Bay Area

does a fantastic job of identifying that's important at this moment in time and how do we create a central gravity of the intersection between that thing that is important plus the things that the Bay Area is really good at doing. For example, mathematical, mathematics has always been important.

Well, let's say for the last three, four hundred years. New versions of mathematics, senses of excellence of mathematics and how they are applied, can vary in geographical distance and over time. Example, Cambridge, et cetera, like quantum mechanics and this time and the other. Okay, got it. Well, the Bay Area is really good at doing. It's like synthesizing these different, let's say, disciplines and experts and drawing and integrating what is required to create commercially successful businesses given the advent of the Internet and computing and blah, blah, blah, blah. So I understand what O'Reilly is getting up, but I'm not entirely sure that just because,

you know, some place in the universe, some place on Earth has become really good at what is the next big thing. Necessarily means that that place then is going to be the center of excellence of where the commercialization of that application and the application of that innovation or that thinking could occur. So let me like his third piece and maybe we'll kind of wrap around this topic. Because this is like the big area where we don't know a lot about what's going to happen. But I do think that, Brian, I don't know if you mentioned it or someone else mentioned it in one of the podcasts I was listening today. But it's the part about regulation. So when you think about like who is Tim O'Reilly talking to, well, you know, obviously he is connected to Jen Palka, who does a lot of work in politics. And in general is connected to a lot of people who, you know, are funders, you know, in that world.

And so when he's talking about regulation, one of the things I think he's also sort of pointing out is that, Silicon Valley obviously has gotten much, much better about lobbying and about having their interests represented in Washington. But from a regulation perspective, I don't think that a lot of the folks who are used to investing in Silicon Valley companies really like regulation very much. And if that's going to come down the pipe and be something that is going to be part of the business environment moving forward, then that also requires a different level of, I don't know what to say. I mean, I guess I've gotten a little bit cynical, but whether it's discipline or whether it's, I don't know, greasing palms and, you know, like, you sort of start to understand

like how the energy industry is the way it is, given all the regulations there in order to get things done. But putting that stuff aside. But, Chris, biotech is highly regulated. Exactly. And highly financed by venture capital. I mean, there's a huge, you know, there's a huge amount of biotech venture capital that gets spent in the area. So one question that I would ask is whether or not the people who have invested, who are venture capitalists who invest in biotech also invest in consumer startups.

And it seems to me, and I'm not saying, and I will take your point, that there's plenty of biotech in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area, but whether or not the type of funding that goes on there is the same, and whether or not the people who are used to funding or having consumer type outcomes and results are going to be as, I guess, amenable to a regulated or highly regulated environment, given all the things that seem to be going on in Washington when it comes to social media, social networks, the big platform search, and the rest. I mean, I would say looking at that, if you're worried about regulation, you could invest in biotech where there's a stable, well-understood regulatory regime, or you could invest in

social media where it's all up in the air. I mean, I think a sensible person would take the biotech bet. I'd also say when I started covering this stuff in the 90s, I knew a lot of VC firms that were more or less evenly split between consumer technology investments and biotech investments. And yeah, they were generally different people in different teams. But like that's true of any kind of specialty. And like just the fact that like it's not, you know, your internet investor is not making biotech bets. I think that's what you would expect and want. I guess I'm just trying to parse out like what like Tim seems to be talking about when it comes to diagnosing the lack of a certain set of skills.

for people in like the Bay Area, you know, when it comes to life sciences. And so maybe, maybe you're right. Like maybe those people already here and he's not talking to them. And he's only talking to his Web2O buddies. And he's like, hey, Web2O buddies, you're not used to living in a world with regulation. You're used to the world of casino capitalism. So you should, you know, get ready for, you know, a world of learning very quickly about how to operate in a very different space.

I think that, you know, I think that VC firms fire some of their Internet investors or let them retire very wealthy from their from their prior yeah true and they hire some biotech people and the the firms and the funds and their limited partners are just fine and the institutional knowledge about you know like remember you know BC firms also help with management and hiring and you know and and sales and like there's a lot of generalizable skills there but yeah I mean I do think that there will be some some BCs who get of the business and some BCs who get into the business or some VCs who have better returns,

you know, like, will the Midas list be heavily weighted towards biotech in, you know, possibly five years or ten years? Quite possibly. Yeah, yeah, that and maybe green tech. Hey, Chris, Brian and Owen, I have to leave, but before I leave, I just want to say, do this more. I'm loving it. I love your analysis.

I love your show. Thank you. You're going to encourage you to do it more. frequently. Yes. And you've touched on some stuff that is like definitely worthwhile of deeper topics, just a single topic of something you just suggest or want to do. So I'm going to encourage you. So thank you very much. I'm going to say good much. I love you guys. Thanks. Thanks so much, Alex. Thank you. And, you know, we do want to open it up. You know, we got a few more minutes. If anybody who's been with us for the full hour and a half here

would like to chime up, you know, raise your hand. come up, either ask a question about something that we discussed today, whether it was about Dispo or about the HomePod or what was the middle story that we talked about? I don't remember anymore. Or anything else, you know, related to tech and the news of the day, you have questions for us. Now would be a great time. Otherwise, we'll start to sort of like, you know, close down the room, but let us know what you think. And yeah, Brian, any other sort of like thoughts about this general topic? I don't know to what degree, I guess, I just am feeling like it is going to be,

I say this all the time where it's these things that I've been hearing for 30 years or right around the corner, whether it be VR or AI or self-driving cars or whatever. I just feel in my gut right now that it is going to be bioscience. It's not that

it hasn't been, but more than AI. Like if we're comparing the two, that's sort of why the Altman piece wasn't as compelling to me as the O'Reilly piece because I am feeling, and maybe, hey, look, this is a confirmation bias, which is like, oh, my God, MRI gave us these vaccines, you know?

Yep. So maybe that's what it is, but, um, uh, like, sorry, keep going. Oh, I was going to say, you know, uh, we need more modernos and pure thermonos, for sure. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Totally. Totally.

I mean, I will, you know, so to build Brian off, off your point and to try to maybe, do better job of encapsulating why reading these pieces. And, you know, funny enough, I read these pieces when I was in Miami and I was on South Beach and I was amongst a bunch of spring breakers and ended up attempting to get a rental car to leave Spring Break, to leave Miami to go visit with my mom, which is what I'm doing now. And I had this horrific experience. I mean, it wasn't horrific. It wasn't like anybody died. It wasn't like, you know, the worst thing in the world. I'm going to write about it because one of the things that I think is really hard to do when you're in the midst of these sea changes. You know, it is, you know, when they talk about boiling the frog,

I think it is an important analogy because there are so many of these grass shoots or pea shoots that are coming up that represent all, all the things that you described is happening. You know, as being 30 years in the making and it's like suddenly they're here and we're like, God, why did it take so long? Or like, you know, what is it going to happen? And then it's upon us. And specifically, I suppose as I'm reading these pieces about the world of automation and AI, and then I'm reading Tim O'Reilly's piece about, you know, we're not ready and we don't have the skill set and, you know, casino capitalism is not going to work and there's all this regulation that's coming. I have this experience where I show up to pick up my Hertz rental car and I'm just going to go

into this for a little bit because I think it's, I don't know, it just, it's so captures a moment, like a vignette of this modern experience that is in the midst of being born. you know, I arrive, I don't know, at like 5 p.m. And it turns out the office of this Hertz rental agency on South Beach closes at 5 p.m. I get there to get my car, planning to drive that evening, the four and a half hours or whatever, to get to the west side of Florida. And the office is closed. Now, this office is won by a human. And this human has decided to leave the office early.

Well, okay, so I don't know what to do. But typically, I'm used to the experience of Hertz when I go to the airport. I literally stroll up. I open the app. I don't really even talk to anybody. I pick a car that I want and I drive out. I show some of my driver's license and I'm on my way. And it's like this almost like perfect world of all these things happening with automation

and digital identity and digital payments. And it's great, to be quite frank. And in this case, the system completely broke down. So I end up trying to call customer service for Hertz. And the entire app experience and the entire. customer service experience is driving me to their website. They're like, oh, you know, do you have a current reservation? Are you talking about like future reservation? Do you want to extend the reservation? Like they have a bunch of use cases and obviously like issues that people call about.

None of them are, we are available to take your phone call. Somehow I manipulate the system into getting in touch with somebody. I start describing, you know, my predicament. I'm like, just open the garage. Let me in. I'll get my car. I'll be on my way. No problem. No harm, no foul. And of course, the customer service person is in some place another part of the world and simply can't do anything. Like the office is locked, the garage is locked. They can't bring the person back for me to get my car. And so I'm screwed. Now, the reason why this was a big deal to me is because this is spring break.

And there are no hotel rooms that are available. So it's, you know, I've been on the phone now for 45 minutes. And I'm starting to freak out because I don't know where I'm going to stay. You know, I've got my stuff. The hotels are all booked. And I'm screwed. So I'm starting to think like maybe I need to like, you know, get in touch with like, you know, Suarez or whatever, like mayor of Suarez.

Maybe he's got a place that I can go or like I got other friends in Miami. but it's just like a really shitty situation. Finally, you know, after the customer service person is like, okay, whatever, you know, just come back tomorrow. You can pick up your car. I'm like, okay, fine. I very narrowly find someone who had just checked out of their hotel room earlier that day and I was able to like grab their room for the evening.

So fortunately I had a place to stay, but I'm like exhausted. I'm angry. I'm like, I'm having my own internal meltdown. And so the next morning I, of course, walk down to Hertz. And this is, mind you, this is like a mile, you know, both ways. So I end up walking six miles back and forth between my hotel and Hertz. I get to the office. And this person who was there, and this is around 11 a.m. or whatever, it's like, oh, we gave away your car.

I'm like, what do you mean you gave away my car? Like, yesterday Hertz told me to come get my car today and it's gone. And I was like, livid. And I was like, well, you need to like get me a car. He's like, well, I can't. You need to call customer service. I'm like, what are you talking about? You are for Hertz.

So there was like this cascade of increasing failures because I didn't follow this golden path. And the human was getting in the way and was completely unempowered. And I'm like, this whole system is completely broken and needs to be rebuilt in an automated system where there is just, I don't know, like, I don't know what it is. But it just occurred to me that you have this totally disempowered person at the end of all aspects of this massive conglomeration of a corporation that can't help me. They can't do anything for me because the system has been programmed in such a way so that he can't help the customers. And I guess like when I think about that, I started to think about this person who I'm interacting with who is unable to help me, who probably doesn't want this job, who ended up leaving, you know, because the office then closed at noon. And so I couldn't go back and actually talk to him and getting help anyways. And what the role of that job is and why that's a job that someone should even hire for.

You know, I sort of like, maybe in the abstract, understand it, you know, humans need things to do. But it just didn't seem like any of the incentives were aligned in keeping that person in that role to do something that they clearly didn't want to do that wasn't actually helping the customer and made all of us feel like assholes. And so I don't know exactly what the solution is, but it seems like that's one of those examples where, and again, like one of the things that I was experiencing when I was calling Hertz was I. And actually, I ended up DMing them on Twitter and I end up, you know, talking to bots. So I guess my point is it's all happening. It's here. There are parts of this, of this new apparatus of the matrix being built out live, that if you just sort of think back, what was my experience like two years ago or three years ago? And what is it now?

You realize that it's already here. But we don't know how to recognize it because it's happening slowly and gradually. And one moment from the next, you know, some piece of the scene has been swapped out and exchanged for some automated other piece of thing. And I think that's the thing that we really need to be starting to take a look at and think about. Are these things fit for purpose? Are they actually being designed to get the job done? Or are they band-aids on top of band-aids on top of band-aids because we don't have the will or the guts to redesign these systems to actually work for and with us, where we're actually augmenting the human's ability to make things happen as opposed to taking it away from them.

And, yeah. Chris, I have a simpler explanation for what happened to you. please. Miami is over. I was going to say you encountered Florida man. Okay. Yeah, well, I almost became Florida man. So yeah, anyways. Well, listen, and as we've discussed a lot,

I was born in Florida so I can speak ill of Florida. But I'd also say this. I mean, not to, not to, I hope this isn't insulting to you, but like the fact that you expect things like, oh, the car to be waiting for you, and things like that. Like, what sort of, I've been in a lot. World do I live in?

What sort of, I've been in a lot of Hertz places in like Northern Michigan where it's not only, is the car not waiting for you, like, you know, you have to be there at the right time. And by the way, it's not just hurts. It's all of the car rental places. I'm just saying, my point, right? Yeah. Like, I have had the experience in various airports, like specifically like, you know, San

Francisco and other places where I'm living in the world of automation and where the door is just open for me. Right. And granted, like, you know, I'm coming from like a privileged place and, you know, I have access to these services. But what I was reading in Sam Altman's piece was that that world will become increasingly available, at least to some larger percentage of the population. And the thing that we trade for that is, you know, having people manning those booths, you know, for hours of the day where, you know, I watched in the office and like the guy wasn't wearing a mask. It was just like this weird sort of like, you know, human experience where there was this. Florida, Florida.

Florida, sure. you know but well no again tell me I'm wrong though tell me that those places in bumfuck wherever aren't going to be replaced by an automated system in a matter of years it's not it's not bum fuck and I hope you won't think that I'm I'm insulting you what I'm saying is is like you know you know shit man I'm not insulted because I have just like a higher standard and I suppose yeah but when you're saying that like the the humans involved in the machine do not have agency I mean that's been the case

for a long, long time. Work in a call center, work in customer service behind a cash register. You don't have agency to do anything beyond the five or six things that you're supposed to do by the manual. That we are destined to be in this world forever, where we need to just continue to recalibrate our expectations lower because that I just...

Okay, fine. Shameless bug here. I recently started a new role. protocol where I'm overseeing enterprise software coverage. And I actually see a lot of exciting things like robotic process automation. Yeah. Which essentially observes people using software and attempts to kind of bridge the we heard later ourselves with.

You know how you're talking to a customer rep and they, oh, I've got to switch to a different. Right? You know, so actually applying AI to kind of the. the software nightmare that we've created could get us out of these situations. Yeah, well, I mean, machine learning basically is reinforcement learning, right? So essentially if the outcome that you want it happens, then you reinforce that path or that route. And so in this case, I just feel like this was like a Pichenko dead end that clearly the system needs to, you know, avoid.

And it could have been avoided altogether by one having an office that doesn't close. And how do you have an office that doesn't close? Well, you can automate it. You know, you sort of treat it. Like, if cars could be checked out, like, you can, like, use an ATM 24 hours a day because you can walk into a, you know, a door by putting in your credit card. Like, why can't, I mean, granted, you know, cars are, you know, moving, you know, killing vehicles. But like, you know, besides that point, if you were able to then, of course, have an, I don't know, like,

I don't know, like, I always, obviously this should have been a self-driving vehicle that just took, you know, that came to you. I ended up hiring a lift to drive me four hours all the way across Florida because there were no cars available for rent in Miami. That was the end of the story. So, yes, a self-driving car would have been a much better solution. I'll pause at one more Occam's razor, which is that Hertz is a terrible company who I've dealt with for years of two.

Another company that was destroyed by private equity, basically taking the asset and driving it into the ground. So that's a possibility as well. Yeah. And I believe, actually, one of the things that I'm reading the monopolists, I think, is the book that I'm reading or something. And it turns out that there's really only like three car rental companies. They're all owned by the same conglomerate.

It's just like liquor and all the other things. So we're sort of like surrounded by monopolies anyways. And so one of the things that I asked them was like, hey, aren't you owned by like another larger car conglomerate? Can't you find like another car at like Enterprise or like sixth or like one of these others? And then they hung up. So, yeah. Hey, we do have to close it up.

But Owen, I did want to ask you, you just jumped to protocol this month or last month or where are you these days? Yeah, I started March 1st, went from pretty much straight from the Chronicle to Protocol. Congrats. Awesome. Thank you. Well, looking forward to tons of great stuff from you from Protocol. Where can you find your work there?

I'm sorry? Where can I, where can you find your work there? Oh, I'm sorry. It's a protocol. And I've got a great team on Enterprise. He's the head mucketymuck. Oh, I always see. It's just protocol.com.

Oh, mm-hmm. Okay, great. It just means I rewrite headlines and, you know, work in the CMS. It's very important stuff. You are part of the enrangement machine. So you can either be, you know, part of for the humans or for the algorithms. You know, it's up to you. I mean, maybe I'm a blog.

Maybe I'm a bot. Oh, and thanks. Thanks for jumping on with this. And again, you were someone that was very kind to me at the beginning of my podcasting adventure. So great to talk to you. I love ride home. Thank you. Hey, Chris, you want to bring it home?

Yep. So you've been listening to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience on Monday, March 22nd. We've covered a bunch of things all over the tech world and gotten deep into the philosophy of, who knows, people in Silicon Valley. and beyond. Hopefully you enjoy this conversation and we will be back again soon, taking the best clips from Brian's ride home tech meme show. And yeah, thanks everybody for saying hi. If you have any feedback, you can check us out. Our links are in our bios. Or no, our bios are, I don't even know how to say it anymore. Go to our profiles. You'll find us there. That's all. Thanks for today.